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Dropbox CEO slams return-to-office mandates, compares them to outdated malls and theaters
(www.techspot.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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RTO is just posturing to share holders.
"Look, look, we're treating our staff badly, so you know we're a good investment!"
Hm, I don't think that's likely. I have some other tinfoil hat theories:
It's actually:
It's the 2008 housing crisis, but with corporate real estate. COVID forced work from home, which caught banks with their pants down, having no way to actually drive the demand back up for these buildings that will continually house less and less people from less and less businesses (Work from home + businesses not surviving Covid, now Tariffs.)
Our entire banking system is backed up by debt packaged with corporate real estate that's rated as AAA, but is just more toxic cat shit no one wants wrapped in dogshit that banks need. It's a bomb that's been growing as giant corporate buildings become ghost towns, and city centers become more horizontal than verticle.
Big companies with big loans from banks know they're fucked if the corporate real estate market collapses. So they force work from home as a band aid that gives their corporate property some value, or at least justifies it on paper. In reality, the cost to force workers into the office always offsets the billions in losses if their corporate office real estate ever followed real market forces and depreciated in value.
I still don't understand how this talking point makes sense. So businesses are purposefully incurring costs to prop up an industry that they're not involved in? A business will stop leasing a building and save money if they can, hell mine did.
Lots of Fortune 500 companies own buildings and both they and their executives have big investments in commercial real estate. They don't want the market to collapse because it'll hurt them all personally.
See my other comment in this thread.
Companies Renting offices are usually not pushing for RTO. Definitely not full time RTO.
Lots of businesses own their offices. Those buildings are assets on the company balance sheet. If no-one uses those offices they become worthless and the company visibly loses money.
Wouldn't those businesses that own their offices still prefer to sell or rent a property if the business will run without it? Artificially filling a property with employees to "make use of" the property rather than get money out of it is a good way to be left holding the bag when other companies ditch their properties to save money and crash the market anyway. To your point, the property is still the same asset whether employees are in it or not; it costs money. I guess I'm not really buying the notion that businesses are banding together to lose money for the greater good of the business real estate market. The same companies that won't even invest in obvious long-term profitability plans? Really?
That is a lot of it. Companies with office assets don't want to be left holding the bag. They have sunk costs (x year leases) and there are some benefits to the business of people being presentatial, so from the employers PoV everyone should return until the lease expires.
If they own the property then not having it fully used means that it will sell for less when they are finally able to do so.
Some jobs also need a proportion of the workforce to be present, so hybrid becomes the best balance for them.
So many Boomers have proven incapable of remote Mgmt. If they don't have staff in line-of-sight, they always seem to default to "they're not working hard," regardless of actual productivity.
Boomers need to retire already and remove themselves from their perches at the top of corporate ladders.
You decided to blame the old people instead of ... checks notes ... the rich people. That was a bizarre choice. Meh.
Disappointed to see ageism here. Boomers get such hate even though they invented gay people and music. My last remote manager was a millenial, he sucked.
Oh please. Boomers as a cohort have earned the enmity. They stole the economic welfare of their children and children's children while hoarding resources and lavishing themselves at every turn. Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z have all been sacrificed on the altar of Boomer prosperity. All the while, they made sure that the ladders they used to gain a foothold in upward mobility were immediately pulled up afterwards.
The last 40 years of decline is directly attributable to the choices and votes of Boomers, who, because of their enormous population size, have had an outsized influence on all aspects of American development.
If you'll excuse some whataboutism, I feel like Gen X-Z are all doing the exact same thing. In Canada, the conservative party is propped up on gen Z voters. (Americans, please note that blue=conservative party.)
Edit: downvoters apparently don't believe me. 338 poll.
Right ... except for all of the poor Boomers out there ... let's just forget about them. Let's forget about all the Boomers who tried very hard to stop the wealth shift to the rich. They don't count; they don't exist.
OK Boomer.
I had to.
Don't you dare call me a boomer, I would never be that old in a million years. I'm incensed.
And who taught him to be that way? That's right, boomer parents
I would qualify your first point. Parkinson's Law tells us that we have pointless bosses in huge numbers, and they need to justify their own existence. The people who actually produce things, everyone can see if they're working or not by looking at the output. But their supervisors, and especially their supervisors' supervisors, those people are desperate to make themselves relevant, to justify their pointlessly-large salaries despite a complete lack of utility.